Читать книгу Canarino - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 8

Elizabeth Ruel was the only child of a US Army general. She had been moving around all her life, and she was expert at planning and executing departures and arrivals. With virtually unlimited financial resources and with a full-time private secretary to barrage the airline, the moving and storage company, and the newly hired American staff by phone, fax, and e-mail throughout April, May and early June, she was able to preserve an atmosphere of total serenity on the day she traveled with her children from London to Rixeyville,Virginia. The only things Elizabeth could neither predict nor control were the weather and the behavior of the children, but she had learned over the years of flying transatlantically for summer vacations, for Christmas shopping, for medical appointments, for parties, to prepare herself mentally for the general types of intemperateness she might expect from the skies and from her offspring. Elizabeth sometimes told her children that serenity came from within; more precisely, she pictured it as a blanket which she could take out and lay over them. She really did not need to take a tranquilizer, and neither did they. The first-class cabin was big enough and empty enough to preclude anything jarring from another passenger. Toward delay, restlessness, boredom, Elizabeth cultivated an attitude of courteous passivity. On this journey, as in life, she had reduced the number of possible unexpected events to a minimum; there was no point in hurry, worry, anxiety, or bother of any kind.

When she arrived at Dulles airport with Gordon, Hope, and their nanny, who was called Norma, there were two cars waiting, a silver Mercedes and a dark green Land-Rover. The farm manager, Mr Richards, had already been instructed by fax to take Norma and the luggage in the Land-Rover. But first Norma belted Gordon and Hope into the back seat of the Mercedes. Nobody spoke; there was nothing that needed to be decided or even discussed. Hope stirred as she was transferred from her stroller like wounded personnel from a stretcher, then quickly settled to sleep again, her neck collapsing at a crickmaking angle, her hair rubbed to a rat’s nest by the long hours on the itchy airplane seat. Gordon, a dazed marine, upright and obedient in his exhaustion, stubbed his foot against the wheel of Hope’s stroller, tripped and fell against the open car door, and crushed Norma inside as she bent over Hope in the back seat.

Elizabeth chuckled, placid, concertedly unruffled, and pulled the door open again, taking Gordon by the hand. ‘Let’s go around to the other side,’ she said in an instructing tone of voice, and then very softly, ‘Tell Norma you’re sorry.’

He mouthed it blankly. ‘Sorry, Norma.’

Norma reached down and rubbed the dents across the backs of her stalwart, black-stockinged calves, but she didn’t stand up or take her head out of the car and she didn’t say anything.

Slowly, sedately, Elizabeth and Gordon walked around the back of the Mercedes. Gordon was carrying a stuffed bear. The bear’s legs were tucked inside Gordon’s bent forearm like the ends of a Roman toga and the bear’s top half was reaching over toward the ground, the arms stretched downward like an acrobat in midhandspring. Gordon’s navy-blue shorts and his underpants were sticking to his thighs and bottom with sweat; he took his other hand from his mother’s and reached down to tug his clothes away from his skin, missing a step. Elizabeth lifted her upper lip disapprovingly; almost imperceptibly she shook her head. But two lessons at once were too many, she decided. She forebore to correct her son further and only smoothed his white shirt across the back of his shoulders.

The flounced hem on Elizabeth’s flowered chiffon skirt fluttered around her finely sculpted knees as a hot wind blew across the tar-smelling, black parking lot. The skirt was creased in the back all the way up to the center vent of her cream linen jacket. Otherwise she was ready for the diplomatic press corps. She watched Gordon climb onto the seat still holding his bear, then she leaned down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She didn’t touch his seatbelt.

‘Wait for Norma,’ she said, just above a whisper; then with a lonely air returned around the car to where the chauffeur, his eyes respectfully glued to her low-heeled, open-backed, cream suede shoes, was holding the passenger door open for her.

Elizabeth always spoke in an undertone, as if guarding her privacy from eavesdroppers. Her voice was soft and wan, with the faintest hint of a southern drawl, and it had a plaintive quality, as of a lady in distress or someone very tired. In moments of excitement or uncertainty, she dropped the volume even lower; she found this commanded the best of people’s attention.

She made no sound at all as she slipped into the car. The seat was burning hot underneath her thighs and she sat up with a silent jolt of pain, lifting her knees to get the flesh clear of the upholstery and flexing her toes onto their very tips to keep her legs high. She turned her head back and said without emotion to Norma, ‘Please check the seat; it might be hot. Do they need something to sit on?’

Norma put the flat of her big, red-mottled hand on the leather between the children, feeling it. ‘It’s fine, Mrs Judd,’ she said in her brusque, indefinably rural English accent. She looked at Gordon. ‘This one’s not complaining.’

The chauffeur circled the car, pressing the doors closed with a firm, subdued click, then got in and started the engine, leaning forward as he did so to conceal the steering column and ignition with a kind of demure, round-shouldered posture that seemed to apologize for the need to exercise his professional capacities in front of Elizabeth and her children.

‘Wait for them,’ Elizabeth said, hardly moving her lips. She watched Norma hoisting herself into the Land-Rover. The brown uniform travels well, she was thinking, but I’ll have to get her out of those thick black tights or she’ll die in this weather.

The drive took over two hours. The afternoon heat shimmered above the rushing, tire-whitened highway and above the sprawling scars of unrelenting development. Strip malls, office parks, condos sat exposed, treeless and shrubless, on the dusty green verges and raw red earth.

Elizabeth couldn’t bear the view. She looked straight ahead.

Out of the corner of one eye, she thought she saw the Land-Rover overtaking them in the outside lane. She turned her head and glanced past the chauffeur. Norma leaned forward in the front seat, grinning and waving as the Land-Rover shot past, windows flashing in the sun.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. She tilted her head across the center console, glancing at the speedometer: nearly seventy.

‘How do I get Mr Richards?’ she asked blandly.

The chauffeur’s eyes flickered toward her; he took his foot off the gas, letting the car lose speed.

‘The cell phone’s at your elbow, ma’am. Just press the green phone twice. I called him just before you arrived.’

She could see the Land-Rover moving away in the left lane; then as the phone began to ring against her ear, it pulled back into the center lane a few cars in front of them.

‘Hello?’ Mr Richards’s deep Virginian voice sounded distant, impatient.

‘Mr Richards,’ she began with caressing sweetness, ‘I’m sure you don’t usually talk on the phone when you’re driving?’

She heard him curse. The car directly in front of the Mercedes suddenly braked, and the chauffeur slammed his brakes on, too; the Mercedes grabbed and jumped.

Then Norma’s voice came on. ‘Everything all right, Mrs Judd?’

‘Yes, thank you. Norma, why doesn’t Mr Richards drop into the right lane, wait for the chauffeur to pass, and fall in behind the Mercedes? Then he can just take it easy.’

‘Yes, Mrs Judd.’ Norma sounded downcast.

Elizabeth added in a solicitous voice, ‘Don’t bother reminding him that the speed limit on this road is fifty-five. Just tell him how special it is for the children to see everything first.’

Almost instantly, the Land-Rover appeared in the right lane, slipping backwards beside the Mercedes.

Elizabeth didn’t check whether it pulled in behind them as they passed. She knew she could depend on Norma.

The chauffeur fiddled with the air-conditioning control and asked in a cautious voice, ‘Are you cool enough, ma’am?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she answered faintly, ‘don’t worry about me at all.’

Otherwise, there was silence. On they crawled, at the speed of respect, dead slow in the far right lane now, dirgeless, joyless, tasteful, serene. Gordon gradually slumped down in his seat and dozed off like Hope.

After the highway, the road rolled and curved through the humid green woods. Everywhere the high trees were drowning in honeysuckle vines,Virginia creeper, and poison ivy. From time to time a vista opened, then flashed closed as they passed fields, barbed-wire fences, pink-flowered spreading vetch; later, post-and-board fences, rampant, lumpy grass meadows, horses grazing. At last they slowed, along the pasture adjoining the farm lane, and turned in at the big, dark green post-and-board gates through the empty fields straight toward the haze-shrouded mountains.

Elizabeth swiveled in her seat, reaching back to pat the children’s legs, coming suddenly to life.

‘Wake up now, Gordon. Wake up, Hope. We’re here, darlings. You’ve had a little rest, and now it’s time to wake up. Do you want to see the farm? Look, we’re passing the pond. There are the ducks. Do you see them?’ She roused them lovingly and mildly, stroking their bare skin, which was icy with air-conditioning.

The driveway mounted and fell away over the small swelling hills; it was graveled in smooth gray stones and the grass alongside was rich and green, mown short, with about three feet clear to the double rows of dark green fences on either side. There were pairs of sapling oaks in full tender leaf every forty feet or so, each with its own enclosure of fence to keep away deer. Elizabeth surveyed it all with satisfaction. She had asked for the trees and the new fences the day she saw the farm. The gravel had been discussed later. The manicure was professional, she thought to herself. At least Mr Richards knows what he’s doing with stationary property.

At the fork in the drive, they turned away from the mountains and through an enormous pair of decorative wrought-iron gates set in a tall laurel hedge. On the other side of the hedge, the white-columned portico of the house rose up two stories in front of them. Spotty fieldstone walls climbed three stories to the peaked eaves above, and spread away in two wings on either side.

Again she tugged on the children’s legs as the car came to a stop. ‘Wake up, you two!’ she whispered urgently. She thought they would be excited to see it. She couldn’t help being a little excited herself. She had bought the place in the dead of winter, gone around it for a few days with the interior decorator, and since then worked from plans and photographs.

She had been remodeling and decorating the house inside her head for six months. It represented a new, chosen, phase in her life. It was nothing to do with men, with giving or receiving. It was her own vision, executed unstintingly.

Nothing in the house belonged to her personally, but everything—every painting, every chair, every light fixture, every doorknob—represented a choice she herself had made and which, taken all together, embodied and revealed her mature sensibility in finest detail. Decoration was one medium in which Elizabeth felt entirely at ease, entirely confident. It was an expensive medium, but she had no reason to hold back. She hadn’t asked David a single question about this house. She hadn’t asked him how much she could spend on it or what he might like. She had decided by herself how he would live and what would make him comfortable. Up until recently she had made such decisions with David’s face before her or with the phrase, What would David think…hovering somewhere in the back of her mind. She had for years divided herself in two, and the stronger part, the outspoken part, had been given over to David’s interests, David’s needs, David. That period of her life was finished. Now she was free to express herself, her neglected, buried self.

It was only a house, only a piece of land; she knew that’s what most people would say. I would even have said it myself at one time, Elizabeth thought. But the years had taught her the power of physical beauty, the danger, the pleasure. Beauty was stable in a house, in an object. It could be worshipped there safely by anyone. Elizabeth felt that her personal beauty had been, unexpectedly, such a burden and had brought her mostly pain; as long as her beauty lasted, she would never be able to stop using it. She knew perfectly well that she was addicted to it, to the worship her beauty brought her. But she felt this as a weakness. Beauty had weakened her because it had given her a false power, false leverage. Either people were afraid of it, or they grew used to it, familiar, and the power faded.

Elizabeth herself was a long way off fading, but she wasn’t anxious about that. It was hardly possible for her to take personal pleasure in her looks anymore. It had been years since she had earned any money by them, and she had never been entirely comfortable selling her looks anyway; however good at it, however successful she had been, she always felt that there was something wrong about it, something wanton—at least if you actually needed the money, as she once had. And there were people she would not have shown herself to, if it hadn’t been for the money. Part of her could never get far enough away from her public life, from those people, and from the sense that she had flaunted something private without realizing it, that she had given her maidenhood away to what she had later come to think of as a mob, a mob she feared and yet also held in contempt because it made of her looks what it liked, what it wanted for itself, without having any real understanding of her, Elizabeth, at all. You could use personal beauty, she had decided, but you couldn’t really control it; you couldn’t give it a particular meaning, a particular content.

Even now, there was hardly anywhere that Elizabeth felt really alone, hardly anyone with whom she felt really safe, because she had once sold herself so widely. And because she knew, although she didn’t like to think about it, that she had been thrilled to do it at the time. Nowadays Elizabeth was certain there was nothing she could gain by her looks which could actually make her happy—unless she knew how to be happy anyway. What was the point of being worshipped?

During her decade in England, she had come to feel that houses, homes, castles, country seats, and the many treasures accumulated in them, could all by themselves intimate something more reliable, a way of living that was beautiful. Rugs, paintings, antiques, she thought, colored the passage of time, shaped it, like emotions—love, happiness, sorrow. Objects and possessions, still and unregarding, offered no threat, and with their clearly proclaimed style and their slow, loyal accretions of patina, they silently, passively enriched the minutes, the hours, the passing days. How many well-protected hallways had she walked along in England—say, with wide dark boards, the walls hung with silk or molded paneling, mirrors, crystal sconces, scenes of hunting or of love between the paned windows, shafts of light angling in across a runner—and thought of countless others over countless years, however different their eyes or their circumstances, who must have walked along the same hallway, passing the same things, and been marked by them, influenced, persuaded? Such a hallway, the rooms it might lead to, long-established, well-appointed, resonant, made time seem whole and contained; they held time back, Elizabeth felt, held it still. They stopped change.

And they stood for worthiness, for unassailable worth. Elizabeth believed that the care spent crafting an object was evident in the object itself. If the object was any good, it was proof of something in mankind that was higher than mere appetite, more refined, more complex. This was obvious in a masterpiece, less obvious but no less true in a minor but fine effort. And Elizabeth knew that she could tell—that she could select minor masterpieces to place alongside a few major ones. She was born to discriminate.

She considered her role with regard to the Virginia property to be more museum curator than owner or consumer. Museum curator was the sort of role that was widely, publicly, approved, valued by many—even those who might incorrectly think she craved possession for the sake of it. She could deal with that—with a degree of misunderstanding. It didn’t bother her at all.

There was hardly anything in the house that was newly made. She had collected the contents from many places—tables, lamps, fabrics, wallpaper, beds, coverings, chests, sofas, tapestries—and they had passed through the hands of many makers, many users, many families; they had been sold and sold again by dealers and auction rooms in London, Paris, New York, further afield. She certainly wasn’t hurting the planet, recycling, reusing, restoring. The collection and its fastidious arrangement reflected her fullest sense of what was possible in terms of visual delight and physical comfort. The house might itself have been a painting or a piece of music—intricate, formally coherent, varied, original. Each detail, each accent of light or color, was carefully meditated upon, calculated to affect, to soothe, to impress or to astonish.

From her little office at home in London, Elizabeth had gone on embellishing until she had to stop herself. She knew that the house had become inordinately important to her. Words like obsession and fetish had passed through her mind more than once during the spring as she had worked away at it. She had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t using the house to compensate for other things in her life—things that had proved to be beyond her control, that hadn’t gone the way she had expected they might, hadn’t been as fulfilling as she might once have hoped. She told herself that working on the house was like a professional commitment. And if it was a compensation—well, it might nonetheless be a major, a significant, a splendid achievement. Once the house was done, she intended to move on to other things. She already had plans.

But, indeed, the house had come to represent a great deal to Elizabeth. Everything. She realized that she was afraid to go inside. She readied herself. It probably won’t be perfect, she warned herself. There will be things that have been done wrong. They can be fixed. It doesn’t matter. The details will fall into place.

As the chauffeur opened her door, Gordon said, ‘I like that Greek temple.’

She couldn’t help laughing out loud; she found Gordon manly and touching. And she felt relieved. ‘That’s the house, Gordon.’

She got out and went around to his door, opening it herself and bending down to release his seatbelt. ‘Come on, I’ll show you inside.’ And she led him away by the hand.

Hope called out, ‘Mummy!’ and sleepily stretched her arms after them across the empty back seat, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to hear her.

The children couldn’t recognize anything in the house. They were silent as Elizabeth conducted them from room to room, their blue eyes wide open, alert to the sense that they shouldn’t touch any of these beautiful things which might easily break if they did. They crept over the carpets from Persia, squinching their toes inside their shoes to make their feet smaller; they nodded in awe at the Italian chandeliers, the olden-day vases from China, the French clocks.

In the dimly lit, dark green dining-room, Elizabeth moved two of the green silk side chairs closer to the American maple sideboard. She stood back to examine the effect, looked up at the downlighters concealed in the ceiling, sighed, and moved the chairs back again. Hope and Gordon watched from the double doorway, their feet rolling forward and backward over the raised threshold in the dark wooden floor.

In the living-room, glistening with creamy silks and gold ornaments, bursting with flowers, Elizabeth crisply circumnavigated the grouped sofas and chairs, going straight to the mantel. She took down a pair of Meissen swans, one modeled with two cygnets, the other with a raised wing, and repositioned them on a delicately carved pearwood shelf hanging between two of the imposing row of five triple-sash windows ranging across the far end of the room.

Hope looked on anxiously. She took a few steps toward her mother, then she looked back at Gordon, reached for his hand and said, watching Elizabeth, ‘Won’t they get cross at you, Mummy?’

Elizabeth pushed one of the swans back a centimeter with her fingertip and turned her head toward Hope.

‘Get cross?’

Hope stared at her mother, squeezing Gordon’s hand.

‘What do you mean, sweetie?’ Elizabeth said it in a monotone as if she didn’t really want to know, still examining the objects on the pearwood shelf, then dabbing with a finishing-off tap at the swan with the cygnets, one hovering at its side, one on its back.

‘Because you’re touching the things,’ said Hope. She let go of Gordon’s hand, shrugged her shoulders, then pressed her cheeks between the palms of her own small hands, embarrassed.

‘These are my things, Hope.’ Then she corrected herself. ‘These are Daddy’s things.’

‘Where did he get them?’

‘I—bought them for him.’ Elizabeth looked out the window onto the enormous veranda. Those extra pillows on the wicker sofas can’t be right, she was thinking. They look lost. I said big, big, big.

‘Why are they here?’ Hope persisted.

‘What? Here?’ There was an undercurrent of annoyance cracking Elizabeth’s mask. We’re all a little tired, she reminded herself.

‘Why are the things here?’ Hope was squeaking.

‘Because this is—our house.’ She sensed herself faltering; Hope’s importunity made Elizabeth self-conscious, but she went on, ‘I bought the house—for Daddy—and I’ve had it furnished for—us—for everyone.’

‘Oh.’ Hope looked at Gordon and smiled a little, even more embarrassed than she had been before. She smoothed down the skirt of her green-and-blue-plaid cotton dress. Then she looked at Elizabeth again, swinging her arms at her sides and blurted out, ‘Well, what about those men in London? You said they were packing our things for us to have.’

Elizabeth came back across the room with deliberate, clicking steps, crouched down beside Hope, and looked her in the eye. ‘It takes a long, long time for the boxes to come.’ She said this very slowly and rather loudly. She meant it to reassure and to comfort. She meant it to settle things in Hope’s mind.

Hope said, ‘Yes.’

Gordon said, ‘Mummy already told us that, Hopie.’

Hope scowled at Gordon and looked back at her mother. There was a silence. They all knew Hope didn’t settle easily.

Hope’s eyes were clear, expectant, trusting. Elizabeth felt swamped by their solemnity, deeply and unexpectedly challenged. Those eyes are ready to receive anything, she thought, accept anything. Judging me is a long way off. Elizabeth looked away. There’s a way to do this, she told herself, that is the right way. The right way for everyone concerned. Then she said, in her special instructing voice, ‘We need a house to live in right now, don’t you think?’

Again Hope said, ‘Yes.’ But each of her ‘Yeses’ was a question; she wanted more.

Elizabeth took a breath. Everything depended now on whether she could settle the children, on whether she could gather them to her. She mustn’t let Hope spook her. Don’t start imagining a four-year-old child can see inside your head, she told herself. ‘So, I planned this for now, and it’s all ready for us. Don’t you think it’s nice?’ Now Elizabeth smiled cheerfully, as if to bring things to a close.

‘But, Mummy, where will all our things fit? This is full already.’ Hope raised her hands in the air, palms upward, stiff with expostulation.

‘I’m not worried about that just now, Hope.’ Elizabeth stood up. Over Hope’s head she spotted a crooked painting and she walked away to straighten it.

‘What about our toys?’ Hope called out to her back.

‘Okay, Hope. Okay.’ Elizabeth leaned back on one heel and squinted at the painting, a whaling ship abandoned in crumpled pack ice in the Bering Sea. ‘Let’s go upstairs. There are some toys you can play with. Nice new ones, up in the nursery. And you have a darling little bedroom to sleep in tonight. Would you like to see that?’

Hope shrugged. She seemed to feel that there was no winning with her mother, but she wasn’t giving in. She was going to wait and see.

On the way back to the big central hall, Gordon spotted a door they hadn’t opened yet.

‘I want to see in there, Mummy,’ he cried, pointing.

‘We will.’ Elizabeth felt slightly out of breath. She dropped her voice, trying to reel the children in, cooing, ‘There’s lots you haven’t seen yet, the library, the music room, the kitchen and the little dining-room. All the staff quarters and the offices. There’s plenty of time.’

But he had already opened it.

‘This one’s empty, Mummy!’ He disappeared through the door. Hope ran after him.

Elizabeth waited, in mid-stride toward the hall.

They reappeared at the door.

‘It’s a nice big one,’ Hope said. ‘It has a brown carpet, and there’s lots of room in it.’

‘The carpet’s supposed to be beige,’ Elizabeth said testily.

‘Don’t worry, Mummy,’ said Gordon. ‘It is beige. We had that color at home. It’s the same. Hope doesn’t know the name. Come look.’

Elizabeth resigned herself. She went to the door and craned her neck around it. The room was paneled in walnut, just as she had instructed, and the carpet was beige. There were built-in bookcases and a big fieldstone fireplace and beige Venetian blinds overhung with beige raw silk Roman blinds in the windows. Otherwise the room was empty.

Hope said, ‘This is Daddy’s study.’

Elizabeth eyed her. Of course Hope was right. It was completely obvious. And, to Elizabeth, it was terrifying. She was in her children’s hands; they knew enough to expose her entirely.

‘Why doesn’t Daddy have anything?’ Hope asked.

‘Daddy’s things will come in plenty of time,’ Elizabeth replied firmly.

Upstairs, Norma was unpacking the children’s bags. She had laid Gordon’s clothes out in neat piles on top of the red-piped, dark blue bedspread on his bed.

‘I know you’d like to say, Mrs Judd, how you want the drawers arranged. I haven’t put anything away yet, nor in Hopie’s little room either. It’s just the summer things?’

Elizabeth took a deep breath, then she put her pale hands to her forehead. Just the summer things? Was Norma going to question her, too? After a moment, she dragged her hands back across her temples, curling the thick strands of her hair around her ears and then down toward her shoulders.

‘Just do the same as at home, Norma. Underwear and pyjamas in the top drawers, then the polo shirts. Shorts in the bottom drawer. Trousers and long-sleeved shirts you should hang up.’

‘Yes, Mrs Judd, I remember.’ Norma was already opening the top drawer. ‘I’ll just get on with it, then, shall I? I expect the children will be feeling quite tired by now. How shall I order their tea? Or will they be having anything more?’

Norma was quickly setting the little stacks into the drawers, smoothing them smartly, snapping the drawers shut with her strong, jiggly-fleshed arms.

‘Don’t bang the drawers, Norma.’

‘No, Mrs Judd.’ Norma didn’t look up.

‘I’ve had them painted by hand, the soldiers. And the chairs and the bed in Hope’s room are handpainted, too.’

‘Yes, Mrs Judd.’

Norma hung up a few small items in the walk-in closet, and then she shut Gordon’s suitcase and disappeared with it inside the closet behind the clothes.

When she came out, she said, ‘Where are the children, Mrs Judd, if you’ll excuse me?’

Elizabeth had gone into Gordon’s blue-and-white-checked bathroom to look at his linen; she didn’t hear.

Norma refrained from clucking. She went straight out the bedroom door calling their names. ‘Gordo! Hopie!’

It’ll take me days to learn this house, she was thinking. I’ve no idea of the trouble they can find. They’ll have to mind me. And they will, too. They’re not bad children, those two. But anyone can make mistakes in a new place.

Sure enough, Hopie set up a wail all of a sudden in the very next room.

‘How do you know it’s for you? I want to ride it, too! You have to share! You’re horrible!’

It was all about a rocking horse.

‘Isn’t that lovely!’ Norma sang, finding her way into the nursery. ‘What lucky children you are to have such a shiny gray horse! Do you know what these are called, these spots at the back, when they’re on a horse?’

They stopped fighting; they knew they could count on Norma to sort it out. Norma was good at being fair.

‘I don’t know what the spots are called.’ Hope sidled up to be caressed.

Norma looked at Gordon, giving him time. He was silent.

Then Norma said cheerfully, stroking Hope’s back, ‘You children have some things to learn about horses this summer, don’t you—if you’re to catch up with your mummy? She loves horses, doesn’t she? These are dapples, these spots. This horse is a dapple gray. By the look of him, he’s antique, so you’d best find something else to fight over. Don’t be spoiling this horse.’

Norma looked around. ‘There’s plenty here. Look at this farm. Gorgeous, isn’t it? And we can build it how we like, and make it look exactly like your mummy’s new farm we’ve just come to. Oh, and Noah’s Ark! Look at that! That’s a special one, too.’ Her voice fell a little. ‘You’d better be careful not to touch those animals.’

What’s wrong with bloody plastic? Norma was thinking. Out loud she said, ‘I’ll ask your mummy if the secretary can order a few more things for you tomorrow, that you can play a bit freer with. I’m sure there’s space for more toys.’

They concentrated on setting up the farm for a few minutes. Gordon drove the tractor up and down the brown driveway that was painted onto the green board fields. He buzzed his lips for the sound of the engine until spit ran down his chin. Hope set up horses in groups of three on another board field: a mother, a father, a baby. There were no brother or sister horses. Norma arranged the barn and the stables for them, but the children didn’t use them.

After a while Norma said, ‘I have to get your things into the chest of drawers, Hopie. You play nicely here with the farm, so I can finish up, and then we’ll have a little explore outside.’

They had all forgotten just how hot it was outside. The roaring, airless brightness took away their breath when they opened the front door and went out into it from the magic of the air-conditioning. The children felt a lazy heaviness climb up their legs, so that it seemed to take forever to walk across the portico and down the steps. By the time they made it over the gravel to the lawn, they only wanted to lie down in the humid, springing grass. The shade of the trees gave no relief; it was as if the temperature had permeated the landscape and radiated from the very ground itself. The air felt moist and thick, like a wet, weighty cloth, but the ground was hard underneath the grass, parched despite being watered twice a day by automatic sprinklers.

Norma found herself hoping that the children wouldn’t run off; she felt she would never be able to chase them, let alone catch them. In fact, she felt like collapsing altogether, and she struggled with herself to stay focused on her lifelong priority: the safety and happiness of her charges.

They need exercise, she told herself. We’ve been traveling all day. Their little legs need a good stretch and their lungs need filling with fresh air or they’ll not sleep well tonight. And she pulled them up from the grass and coaxed them around to the back of the house.

‘Listen to the cicadas, children. I think it’s cicadas, here in Virginia. That sort of singing, whirring sound. Do you hear it?’

They stood in the grass and the singing swelled at them, in big pulses. It seemed to make the air feel even closer, even heavier.

Behind the house, they came upon an enormous box hedge, higher than Norma’s head, running away in both directions like a green wall, bellying and ballooning with its ancient growth, the tiny leaves glittering in the afternoon light. There was a way through the hedge right at the center, a natural arch over brick paving. The arch led them onto a wide brick walkway running left to the shadowy veranda at the back of the house and right to the lawn which spread and fell away downhill until lost to view. There was another box hedge facing them on the other side of the walk.

Gordon was in front, then Hope.

‘Look, Hope, there’s another tunnel!’ And he led the way through the matching archway in the next hedge with Norma right behind them.

Through the second archway, the narrow brick path curved and disappeared in both directions. The box towered above them, dimming the light.

‘It’s a maze,’ said Norma, suddenly realizing it. ‘You’ve got to follow the path and see if you can make your way to the center.’

So they started slowly, expectantly, along to the left, turning, winding back near where they had just been. Then they found another fork, tried right this time, came to a blank wall of springing box, fell against it, laughing.

‘This is not the way!’ said Hope. And she slapped at the bushes in front of her, then swung her arm backwards and forwards through them. They gave off a dry, rich smell, a mixture of dust and crushed foliage.

‘Don’t break the branches,’ Norma cried out, grabbing her arm, ‘it takes forever to grow something like this, and it’s been very well tended, too.’

Hope wriggled free and twirled around with her arms extended, her fingertips just clearing the hedge encircling them, reaching for it, daring Norma. She checked to see whether Gordon was watching her. She stopped twirling and touched a leaf, pinched it between her fingertips, let go. Then she looked at Norma; it was a very saucy look. Norma did nothing.

‘I’m the leader now,’ Hope shouted, and she flew past Gordon back the way they had come.

Now there was calling and laughing, sweating and puffing, all along the old brick paths for ten or fifteen minutes until they finally found the center of the maze with its stone bench and its sundial.

Norma was dripping; all three of them were out of breath. Norma sat down on the bench and pulled at her tights, lifting them off her skin and letting them pop back.

‘I’ve never been so hot!’ she exclaimed. ‘We must all drink plenty of water. Pity there’s no fountain here inside the maze. Wouldn’t it be nice?’ She felt done in, utterly. ‘We’ll get used to the heat, I’m sure.’

Gordon said, ‘I’m sick of this place. How do we get out?’

Norma wiped the perspiration from her face with the backs of her hands. The maze seemed suffocating now; Gordon was right. But she didn’t let on. ‘Well, let’s rest just a bit and then we’ll find it. We’ve got in; we’ll surely get out.’

‘You lead us, Norma. You’ll find it first,’ said Gordon.

So Norma heaved herself onto her feet.

‘All right then,’ she said. She saw shiny purple-black spots swimming along at the corners of her vision. Her head felt empty, floating, as she reached for Hope’s hand.

‘Stick with me, young lady,’ she told Hope.

And she started blindly back along the path, steadily brushing the box with one shoulder without even noticing it, until Gordon said, ‘Norma, why are you doing that? You’re ripping all the leaves off!’

Norma turned to look, swiveling her head this way and that way, down toward Gordon, back at the hedge, clutching Hope’s hand. She heard the cicadas sing louder and louder, like a rushing noise in her ears. Her stomach turned over inside her, and she thought she’d be sick, but instead she just keeled over backwards, toppling heavily like a felled tree into the brittle old bushes. The bushes stretched and sprang and held her in the air for a brief moment, then snapped and cracked, slowly at first, then faster, popping and exploding as she went down, down—right through the hedge to the next pathway on the opposite side with a thwack of her skull on the hard brick path that impressed Gordon and Hope more than anything else which had happened that day. They simply stood and stared.

Hope rubbed her hand a little, where Norma had been gripping it with a death grip which had nearly pulled Hope down with her. She said, ‘Owee, Norma. Owee.’

Then Gordon said, ‘Hopie! Poor Norma. Hers is much worse. Don’t cry, Hopie.’ And they went on looking at Norma, waiting for her to say something.

But Norma didn’t say anything and she didn’t move.

So naturally Hope asked, ‘Is Norma dead?’

And Gordon said, ‘How do I know?’ Then, thinking it over, he said, ‘But we need to find Mummy.’

Hope never liked this particular solution, but instinctively she knew Gordon was right. She nodded sadly.

Next Gordon said, ‘If we call her loudly, Mummy will hear us and she’ll come and find us, even though we’re in this—this maze.’

Hope nodded again. So they shouted as loudly as they could for a while, trying out both ‘Mummy!’ and ‘Help!’ They both shouted ‘Help!’ much more loudly because it felt more exciting.

‘Help! Help!’ Hope giggled with fear, jumping up and down. Then she smiled.

No one came.

Finally, Hope yelled, ‘Daddy!’ A long wailing cry.

‘He’s not even here, Hopie. Silly.’

Again she yelled, ‘Daddy!’ in defiance, her lips pouting with anger when she stopped.

Gordon felt very unhappy and very tired, but he also felt that this was a chance for something—it was a chance to get grown-ups to notice that you could do things they admired, like apologizing first in a fight or telling on yourself when you were naughty but hadn’t been caught. He felt that somehow it might be his fault that Norma had fallen over and wasn’t getting up.

Hopie didn’t think it was her fault, but she thought they might both get in really bad trouble, and she couldn’t see how Norma was going to protect her from that.

‘I know the way out of the maze.’ Hope sounded confident, boastful.

‘You do not!’ said Gordon.

‘Well, we can find it. Norma said we got in and we can get out.’ She reached for Gordon’s hand. ‘Come on.’

‘Okay, Hope. Okay.’ He was trying to sound like their mother. He lorded it over Hope with a point of reason. ‘We should go through that way, where Norma fell. It’s already closer to the outside you know.’

So they crawled through the broken bushes, right over the mountain of Norma, in her brown uniform and her black tights and black shoes. And they left her lying there as they walked tentatively along the path on the other side.

Gordon tilted his head backwards to look up at the sky. He couldn’t see the house or anything at all.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Hope.

‘So am I,’ said Gordon.

Elizabeth was in the library talking to the interior decorator on the telephone when Mr Richards came in to tell her that he had found the children in the stream and brought them back to the house.

She was hunched over in a small chair at the great, leathertopped desk, and as Mr Richards started to speak, she waved a hand in the air and turned away from him, squeezing the receiver tightly against her ear and pressing two fingertips of her other hand against her other ear to shut him out.

Mr Richards stopped dead in his tracks. He was a big man, suntanned, vigorous, crisply turned-out, used to making an impression on women. He quelled his sense of insult with difficulty. It must be long-distance, he decided. An emergency in London. And he made himself wait, staring angrily at the cream linen stretched tightly across Elizabeth’s thin, square shoulders.

‘And I’ve had to rearrange a number of the objets,’ she was saying in a caustic tone. Then there was a pause.

Mr Richards didn’t like telephones. And he didn’t like fax machines and e-mail. And especially cell phones. What he liked was working outdoors at his own pace and making a perfect job of it. He knew how to get things done and how to manage workmen and he didn’t like interruptions or, he was discovering, being bossed around.

This woman, he thought, has too many gizmos at her fingertips. She is fussing at the speed of sound. Or maybe the speed of light; Mr Richards wasn’t sure about the technology. Everyone has to know all about it the minute she isn’t happy. Her beauty is—wasted. It’s a lot to waste, too, he thought. He had been simply amazed at the airport: Easily the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, he had concluded.

He looked around the room at the shelves loaded with old leather-bound volumes. It had a sort of eighteenth-century look, he was thinking, sort of Thomas Jefferson. Serious study, high ideals, Virginia gentleman. It had what people called an aura. An aura which ought to suit such a woman. She has certain qualities. If she had been born in an earlier time, she might have had to practice a little patience, Mr Richards mused, she might even have been forced to place herself in the hands of someone a little stronger and trust him to look after her. That’s what her sort of beauty is really meant for, he thought, to give her half a chance in tough circumstances. Nowadays looking like that is completely unnecessary. It just throws everything off, skews the balance; women do everything they want for themselves anyway. It’s not a fair fight, not with all her extra pulling power. But maybe it’s just because I think like that that I’m the farm manager and she owns the goddam farm.

She knew what she was up to, pulling all this together. And unbelievable amounts of money.

But her kids! They need supervising on a farm. Neither one of these London women has a clue.

Elizabeth said into the phone, very patiently, ‘The maid should have been given all the diagrams for the shelves. You have to teach new staff everything. And she shouldn’t be moving figurines from one part of the room to another, anyway.’

Something has been smashed, Mr Richards was thinking. Could it possibly matter more than the kids? He cleared his throat. Then he said, boldly, ‘Mrs Judd!’

She started and sat up, still with her back to him, saying very quietly into the phone, ‘Hang on a second, Joshua. There’s someone here.’ She put one hand over the mouthpiece and slowly, carefully turned, looking serious, attentive. She bent all her concern onto Mr Richards, narrowing her gemlike, unnerving blue eyes in concentration. Gravely, politely, she said, ‘Yes?’

Mr Richards refused to be cowed. ‘Something has happened to the children’s nanny, Mrs Judd. I found them—Gordon and Hope, isn’t it?—in the stream. They were calling for help. They’re pretty upset.’

Elizabeth’s face was still.

Mr Richards was thinking,This woman doesn’t like to be rushed.

Then she put the receiver back to her ear and said in her languid, melancholy way, ‘Josh, I’ll have to call you back.’

She put the phone down and stood up, brushing herself off, as if she were covered with crumbs, though Mr Richards couldn’t see any.

‘What were the children doing in the stream?’ Her voice was calm, detached, a little sad; her eyes wistful, burdened.

He sensed that she felt painfully disappointed in the children. Suddenly she looked very solitary, very slight. Was she going to cry? he wondered. He felt confused by her sorrow, the heavy feeling of it between them. Without realizing it, he took a step toward her. Though he couldn’t have said why, he found himself wanting to cheer her up, to reassure her.

‘They said they went for a drink of water. The nanny told them to drink plenty in the heat, which is good advice. But they shouldn’t be drinking from that stream, Mrs Judd. It’s not clean water. Full of run-off, fertilizer, God only knows what. The trouble is, they couldn’t find their way back to the house, and they liked the look of the willows—cool, you know, irresistible.’

Elizabeth wrung her white hands, not hard, then pressed the tips of her long thumbs against one another, silent. She stared at the desktop. Then she looked back up at Mr Richards.

‘What happened to Norma?’ It was a perfectly ordinary request for information; her voice expressed no anxiety, no irritation.

‘That’s the nanny? I have no idea. Although I think maybe I know where to look for her. But, Mrs Judd, your children are crying.’ Now Mr Richards wasn’t certain he had expressed his concern with enough urgency; his voice ratcheted upwards. ‘I left them with the chef, but they don’t know him; they’d be better off with you, Mrs Judd.’

Elizabeth reflected. At last she said, ‘All right.’ And she brushed herself off again, in preparation.

The children weren’t crying. They were sitting up on stools at the kitchen counter eating English muffins with butter and honey on them. Hope looked around as her mother came in; she was chewing loudly. A shadow moved through Hope’s blue eyes. She shut her mouth, rubbed all around it with her small fingers, wiping it clean, then went on chewing, silently.

The chef stepped back from the counter where he had been leaning over the children, stood up straight, said nothing.

‘Norma needs an ambulance, Mummy. We were coming to tell you.’ Gordon took another bite of muffin.

‘Would you make me some coffee, please,’ said Elizabeth, not looking at the chef. ‘Just black.’

She touched Gordon’s back, giving it a half-stroke, then another, fitfully.

‘Why did Norma leave you alone?’ she asked lightly, as if it wasn’t of much importance.

‘Norma didn’t leave,’ said Hope, putting the remaining piece of her muffin down onto her plate with both hands, ‘we did.’ She looked at her mother anxiously, expectantly.

Elizabeth stood holding her hands in front of her, the fingertips loosely curled inside one another. She squeezed them tightly for a moment, then relaxed.

‘You ran away from Norma?’

‘No, Mummy, we didn’t run.’ Hope shook her head soberly. She knew she was right about this.

Gordon said, ‘Norma fell over in the maze, Mummy, and she didn’t get up, so we had to find our own way out, and then Hope fell into the stream and got scared and started yelling.’

Mr Richards came into the kitchen. He announced that he had found Norma sitting on the brick path near the entrance to the maze with an arc of vomit around her. She was badly scratched, had a coconut-sized lump on the back of her head, and had failed in her evidently tenacious effort to crawl out of the maze after the children. Her hands were icy, and she had begun to cry and shake all over when he tried to help her up.

‘I need some help getting her into my car,’ he went on. His voice was robust, with an edge of adrenalin. ‘She needs an X-ray. She’s got the mother of all lumps on her head and she’s puking everywhere; I’m sure it’s a concussion. I just hope her skull’s still in one piece or her brain will be swelling right through the cracks.’

Elizabeth winced. She placed her hand on Mr Richards’s forearm and looked at him in silence with pleading, dewy eyes.

He was taken aback. ‘I need help!’ he repeated, shrugging his shoulders.

Elizabeth kept her hand on his arm, pressing it. ‘The chef will help you,’ she whispered.

But Gordon had already caught it all. ‘Her brain is swelling through cracks in her skull? Oh, Norma!’ His eyes were alight with horror.

‘What’s “puking”, Mummy?’ asked Hope.

Elizabeth didn’t answer. She looked sorrowfully at Mr Richards. He smiled and turned to Hope.

‘Puking’s throwing up, sweetie,’ he said.

Hope nodded.

‘Sounds like it,’ said Gordon. ‘Sounds gross.’

‘You’d better get her to the hospital, then,’ said Elizabeth in a tone of voice that suggested they might never go at all unless she urged them to. Let’s get this episode over with, she was thinking, seizing the initiative as if it had been her own all along. She smiled graciously at the chef. ‘I can wait for my coffee, Pedro; it’s no problem. I’ll watch over the children and spend a little time with them.’

As Pedro took off his apron and rushed out after Mr Richards, Elizabeth picked up the telephone. ‘Shall we call Daddy, children? I’ll bet he’s waiting to hear from us.’

She paced around the kitchen with one hand on her slim hip, the phone jammed against her ear, ringing forlornly. Then she looked at her watch and counted off the five-hour time difference on her fingers. It’s nearly eleven there, she thought, why hasn’t he called us? Maybe his flight into Heathrow was delayed.

She dialled both numbers again, the cell phone and the house. No answer. Then Elizabeth made herself put the phone down. Leave it alone, she told herself, he’s somewhere. Eventually he’ll call.

And she repeated it out loud to the children, smiling through her frustration and her sense, all over again, of not being missed.

‘Daddy’s somewhere,’ she said, ‘and he’ll call eventually.’

‘Is he taking care of Puck?’

‘Don’t worry about Puck, Gordon. Francine will take care of Puck.’ Grimly she thought to herself, God knows, I’ve paid her enough.

The gleaming, cavernous kitchen seemed chilly to Elizabeth. There was no food cooking, the wide counters were empty. Row upon row of saucepans and pots hung clean and ready, row upon row of knives. Industrial, uninviting. This could never be her domain. She budged in between the children’s stools, and circled her arms around them, giving them each a squeeze.

‘Are you tired, you two?’

They didn’t answer, recognizing this as a trick question.

So Elizabeth tried, ‘Do you want anything else to eat?’

Gordon said, ‘What else can we have?’

She stepped away and opened the refrigerator. What she saw inside made her feel even colder; she was reluctant to break in on the chef’s mysterious, suspended preparations—heads of lettuce, a whole pimpled yellow chicken, meat marinating in something red with yellow slicks of fat hardened on the surface, packages wrapped in white paper and sealed with light brown tape, the prices scribbled on the outside in waxy red crayon. She made herself open a drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator. She couldn’t engage with any of it—could hardly recognize it as appetizing or imagine why anyone would want to eat it.

‘There’s fruit,’ she said without expression. ‘I can make you some fruit. Or salad? Do you want me to wash some lettuce for you?’ She shivered, thinking of the icy water.

Gordon said, ‘That’s okay. Thanks.’

Hope piped up, ‘I like grapes and strawberries for fruit.’

‘Okay, grapes.’ Elizabeth went to the sink with the plastic bag of grapes, rinsed them and shook them off and brought them to the counter. She didn’t open a drawer or a cupboard to look for a colander or a cloth or a napkin or a plate.

‘I don’t know where anything is,’ she explained, as if the children might have views on her lack of culinary commitment.

Beads of water clung to the grapes and spread over the counter where she put them down. Her hands were wet. She shook them and the drops fell on the floor. She wondered why Pedro was taking so long.

Hope plucked the grapes off one at a time, munching, staring into space. Then she said, ‘We couldn’t find any horsies, Mummy.’

Elizabeth said nothing. She felt a flush of anxiety rise under her eyes.

‘We looked in all the fields.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Where’s my pony?’

‘Tomorrow we’ll find out all about ponies,’ she said vaguely. ‘It’s late now, and, anyway, Mr Richards who manages the farm went with Norma. Remember?’ There, she thought, no farm manager. Settle down, Hope.

She looked at her watch again. She thought about turning on the lights. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun had gone beyond the corner of the house. The kitchen seemed dim, the children puny, marooned in it. She wondered how the television worked. That would brighten things up. Then she caught herself: get a life, she thought, by which she meant to remind herself that television was for people who had absolutely nothing better to do, for the lonely, the weak. She was not ready for last resorts. Not by any means.

There must be a newspaper somewhere which she could look at. And she cast her eyes around the room. It was bare, bleached, a place of work, without sin or distraction. Without home comfort.

And her thoughts veered in a new direction. What kind of mother is so restless, so impatient, that she reads the newspaper when she ought to be looking after her children?

Elizabeth sighed. How she longed to be a good mother. It was something she really cared about and could entirely justify. But how was it done? So much of it seemed to be standing by while the children did what they would do anyway even if she wasn’t standing by. How could she engage with them, really? How should she? They could carry you anywhere, unplanned, into chaos, wasted time, and Elizabeth felt it must be right to let them do that, in small things anyway. It wasn’t all about exercising her own will. It couldn’t be. Children called for self-immolation, for non-existence of some kind.

Was it because she cared so much that she found it so hard—getting inside their heads? But she knew that wasn’t it. She knew that when she got close to imagining what things looked like through Gordon’s eyes, through Hope’s eyes, she couldn’t actually bear it, the desperate emotions, the pell-mell striving, the life-and-death fussing which never achieved anything. Childhood wasn’t something she could do again. She had fought too hard to grow up herself. She stood back from childhood. She soothed it down. She skirted around it.

‘Let’s go upstairs and have a bath.’ She nuzzled Gordon’s neck.

Hope asked, ‘Do we have to go to bed now, Mummy? Before Norma gets back from the doctor?’

‘Hope likes Norma at bedtime, Mummy,’ Gordon announced.

‘I know,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But I can read you a story tonight and tuck you in.’

Hope looked away, frowning.

‘And maybe Norma will be back in time. You can surprise her by being all ready.’ Elizabeth tried to sound encouraging; she tried not to command.

In a noble voice, Gordon said, ‘Norma’d like that, Hopie, wouldn’t she?’ Gordon got off his stool and put his arms around Hope and lifted her down to the floor. ‘Be good for Mummy, Hopie. Mummy gets tired.’

He preened for his mother, knowing that he was being the angel grown-ups liked to praise. But Gordon had no idea just how big a hole he was trying to fill. He was like the little Dutch boy with a finger in the dike.

So they had the baths and the stories, and Elizabeth took off her shoes and climbed into Hopie’s little pink and white bed and the three of them nestled there sleepily like puppies. They were slightly hungry and they were numb with fatigue; it made them weak, cozy, gentle. After a while, when both of the children had fallen asleep, Elizabeth roused Gordon again, half-carried him to his own bed and wrestled him as gently as she could under his covers. Then she lay down beside him, one hand floating up and down on his slow-heaving chest. There was nobody else anywhere near them for miles and miles.

Elizabeth woke up when Pedro and Mr Richards finally came back. They had left Norma in the hospital for observation. Maybe she’d be okay in a few days. Tomorrow they would do a brain scan. Mr Richards planned on driving back to see her again first thing in the morning. He said good night and left abruptly.

‘I’m sorry about your dinner, ma’am,’ Pedro said. ‘Mr Richards instruct me to hold up the young lady’s head in the car. It was no choice that way.’

Elizabeth nodded with a look of wise patience. Of course she understood. After all, it was an emergency, wasn’t it? No, she really wasn’t hungry now. She didn’t want anything to eat.

Pedro watched her, dipping his quick, dark head, alert to the famished languor of her expression. He thought madam was hungry, but he didn’t say anything. He’d found over the years that his employers were unpredictable at first. He was always cautious in a new job.

Even so, Elizabeth felt scrutinized, and she didn’t like it. She said, ‘I gave the children some fruit.’

Pedro nodded. ‘Of course, ma’am.’

Then she opened the back door and went out onto the veranda in the teeming black night.

A few minutes later, Pedro came with the telephone and found her sitting on the wicker sofa among the scattered, small, soft pillows with which she was so disappointed.

‘It’s your husband, ma’am.’ He handed her the phone. ‘Good night.’ He bowed and went back inside.

‘What happened?’ Elizabeth managed to smile into the phone. She teased David as if he were a boy who had gotten lost on his way home.

‘I ran into an old friend.’ David’s voice sounded sleepy, incredibly close by.

‘An old friend?’ She wanted to know who, but she didn’t let on how much she wanted to know. She kept her curiosity in check, casual, friendly.

‘Honey, it was Leon! I’m completely drunk.’ There was a lazy pause as David rubbed his eyes. ‘He hasn’t changed, I’ll tell you. He’s a wild man! We had a lot of fun.’

‘Well, I’m glad.’ Elizabeth’s drawl grew broader, indulging him, a southern belle with her frippery admirer. It felt right to drawl, curled up on the veranda in the Virginia night, the crickets and frogs creaking their hearts out all around her and the slight breeze lifting her sweat-fatigued hair from where it was sticking to her temples and the back of her neck, lightening it, floating it dry. She said nothing about Leon. Suspicion made a twist in her gut. Why had Leon gotten in touch with David the very day she left town? What were they up to?

Past the black, looming box bushes, way off to the left, she thought she could make out the willows’ green veil sweeping the grass, lanky tendrils hiding the brink of lawn where it ran down to the stream. Somebody switched off a light along the staff wing and the willows disappeared. Pedro had gone to bed.

‘It’s beautiful here, darling,’ she crooned. ‘The night is black as pitch, no lights for miles, apart from our own. We’re all alone, away from everything. Real privacy.’

‘How’re the kids?’

‘Asleep. They asked about you. Well, they asked about Puck.’

David laughed in his throat. ‘Selfish little bastards.’

‘We’ve had a bit of a misadventure, though.’

‘What—you’ve already had a riding accident?’

‘I’m serious, David. Norma fell down—or maybe fainted, I don’t know. She’s in the hospital. I’m all alone here with the kids. I don’t know how I’ll cope. They’re such a handful. They went all around the farm today completely by themselves, didn’t tell anyone where they were, and nearly drowned in the stream!’

‘Jesus.’ David felt bewildered. He had no idea there was a stream. ‘What about the swimming pool, then?’

‘They haven’t found that yet.’

‘Well, you’ve got to stay with them all the time, Elizabeth.’ David felt angry suddenly; he hardly knew why. Through helplessness, maybe. He pictured them, white-clad, wading, unattended, but he had no idea what the farm looked like.

Elizabeth yawned, a delicate kitty-cat yawn, then wider, gaping, throwing her head back like a lioness. ‘Norma’s going to be in the hospital for a few days at least. I have no idea what shape she’ll be in when she gets out. Maybe useless! It’s a complete nightmare.’ She put a hint of melodrama in her voice, exaggerating on purpose to lighten David’s anger, to make him laugh.

‘There must be some nice local woman who could help out?’ David tried to be practical. ‘It’s summer; what about a college kid or even a high-school kid?’

‘Oh, God, and then I have to interview them, train them! It’s so time-consuming,’ Elizabeth wailed in self-pity, half-mocking, then chuckled dryly.

This was their married banter. David had to offer suggestions, although they both knew she would reject them. The solution had to be her own. It was a game. Comical. Cynical.

‘Maybe you should have gone to Nantucket?’ David was cautious.

She was dulcet-toned but dismissive. ‘It’s a little late for that.’

‘Well, at least you wouldn’t be all alone.’

‘I’d much rather be alone!’ Now her lament was authentic. ‘The way people drop in on you there. No privacy. Having to make conversation all day long at the beach, or at that awful little yacht club. Those old ladies who ask me about your parents and your sisters!’

She paused. She had begun to whine and she knew it. She collected herself and taunted David with a domestic point, as if she were, after all, considering his idea. ‘Anyway, we have no place to stay now on Nantucket.’

To her surprise, he took her up on it, calling her bluff. ‘I’m sure you could rent something if you offered enough money.’

‘And who’s going to organize that?’ She had to struggle to get out of it.

‘You’ve hired a secretary, haven’t you?’

‘She’s new, David. I’d have to tell her what I wanted. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.’ She laughed in triumph, and David laughed, too, at the absurdity of this truth—Elizabeth’s exhaustion. At a certain point, giving one more instruction was impossible for Elizabeth.

Then suddenly he asked, ‘Why’d you make me sell that house, Elizabeth?’ His voice went throaty with an odd, pleading fear. He wouldn’t have brought it up again if he hadn’t been drunk—drunk and, even after six months, awash in a tide of regret and confusion. He couldn’t believe that they had sold the house—no matter what Elizabeth’s feelings. ‘Now that we’ll be back in the States,’ he added defensively, as if to justify his question, ‘we’d use it so much more often.’

Elizabeth didn’t answer. There were things she wanted to say, or at least had once wanted to say. But it was, indeed, too late to say them now. The house had been David’s family’s house; she and David had first gone there in the role of children. And even though David had bought the house from his sisters after his mother died, it was still full of childhood, of his past that was not her own past, of primordial energies Elizabeth could never control or even make terms with. Nantucket, she was thinking, was the last place she herself had felt like a child. Vulnerable, hopeful, in the extreme. As she would never be again. She and David had opened a wound between them there, and she had believed—what?

The wound had never healed, anyway. It had only hardened. Like so many grains of sand, clammed up inside her, layered over and over with hardness—shiny, luminescent, made beautiful simply by the hardness and tenacity of her will to make things beautiful. Childhood was not a safe place. Not for children, not for anyone. She and David had needed to put childhood behind them. She could remember lying on David’s boyhood bed last summer, waiting, hoping for someone—David?—to do something, to save her, and she had thought, Stop this. She had decided there and then to take responsibility for her side of their bargain. Childhood, Nantucket, the whole toy town had to go.

There had never been a chance to explain this to David. It was almost as if they had never been alone together since then. And time had raced on uncontrollably, childhood, middle age, disillusionment, on toward the grave. What did it matter? None of it was relevant anymore. She told him none of it now.

Finally, he broke the silence. ‘You know one of my sisters tried to rent the house for a couple of weeks. New owner wasn’t interested. Couldn’t have cared less.’

Elizabeth said, ‘That’s not my problem, David. And it’s not yours either. The house didn’t suit us.’

Very little did suit Elizabeth and David as it turned out. Later, when she reflected on it, Elizabeth considered that the Nantucket house had been only the beginning. By the time it was actually sold, in January, she had begun to see just how far she might go. A whole new vision of her life.

‘Why don’t I just come over, Elizabeth? Tomorrow. Surprise the children. We can work things out together, about Norma.’

Elizabeth was embarrassed. ‘Oh, God, no! I’ll manage,’ she said lightly. ‘Concentrate on work. That’s what we agreed. I enjoy being with them, watching over them.’ She felt a little afraid when she said this. As if she had volunteered to drive a long distance alone at night in severe weather. But she knew it was the right thing to say, and she was determined to do it—to watch over them. To enjoy them.

‘We’ve had a long day,’ Elizabeth said, ‘that’s all. We’ll be fine here once they—get settled.’

But David didn’t let the game drop. ‘Don’t you think the kids’ll miss the beach? The ocean? It must be fucking hot where you are.’

Elizabeth was silent. She found David’s language surprising sometimes.

‘I could come over for a weekend or two, if you were in Nantucket, Elizabeth. At least I’d try. It’s summer. Summer means—the ocean.’

She disagreed. ‘The children have acres to roam right here, David, and nobody to bother them. There are woods and fields. They don’t have to compete with anyone else; they can just be free, be children. Have their own thoughts, play their own little games.’

David’s mind was wandering. He was thinking about his sailboat. Had it been sold along with the house? Or was it still at the boatyard? He’d like to get it put out on the mooring—just in case. Maybe Elizabeth would be willing to send the children up by themselves for a weekend. They could stay in a hotel. Rent an old jeep. He thought about the water and the sky, the cold, tangled seaweed that slapped on the wooden hull when you pulled up the moorings. The azure, dimpled waves.

‘David?’

He started. ‘I guess I fell asleep.’

‘Go to sleep, then. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

She was murmuring, ever so soothingly, he thought. It felt to David like she was next to him, in the bed. Like she was kindly. Telling him to do as he liked, to rest. That she would deal with everything.

‘Yeah.’ He opened his eyes for a second, on the glaring, empty bedroom. Elizabeth had hung up.

What a crazy, unbelievable night, David was thinking, drunk, drifting again. He was lying on his back on the bed with the telephone on his stomach. It’s as if the moving men have packed up everything inside my head, as if they’ve taken every stick of mental furniture. Rugs out from under me. Ooof. He pictured himself falling, heavily, forever, like a sack of rocks, tumbling. Nothing to stop him, nothing even to slow him down. Where was he in his life? How had it all come about?

He felt himself as a little boy again, yearning toward the future, straining to keep up with his older sisters, buffeted by their energy, their closeness, a throng of Amazonian arms and legs growing up over his head. Then breasts he could remember and other fascinating parts he had caught glimpses of through keyholes, half-shut doors, coming out of the surf at the beach, slick and brown. They had been playful with him, generous, natural. He loved their beautiful bodies openly, admired at supper their elbows, long hair, brainy talk.

And he had listened to their constant, ongoing discussions of what so-and-so was like; what so-and-so said at the end of the party; whether this or that teacher was good-looking or whether he really cared. It was like living in a cloud of feminine intuition.

His parents had been too old to interest him much, they were grizzled, sexless, devoted to golf. What involved him—obsessed him—emotionally, were his sisters. He had learned each of them by heart, all four of them, through continual worship, through fear, through pleasure. So his sisters were what he knew about women to start with. It was a lot. How women talked, what made them cry. Their smells, subliminal, intoxicating, which changed from minute to minute.